US engineering and construction giant McDermott has delivered India’s Oil & Natural Gas Corporation’s (ONGC) with the keys to the KG-DWN-98/2 deep-water gas field development in the Krishna Godavari basin off India’s eastern coast.

The company said on Wednesday that the successful conclusion of the contract covering the subsea production, risers and umbilicals systems for the U-field was achieved in spite of the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and an active monsoon season.

McDermott, along with Baker Hughes and India’s Larsen & Toubro (L&T), was awarded a $1.69 billion integrated subsea contract by ONGC in October 2018 for work on the KG-DWN-98/2 asset.

McDermott chief operating officer Samik Mukherjee said that, completing the subsea campaign, combined with an earlier milestone of putting an early production system in place within 14 months, demonstrate what he described as the company’s “ability to deliver complex subsea projects in challenging circumstances”.

McDermott described the KG-DWN 98/2 project in the Cluster-2 region as “the largest and one of the most complex subsea projects in the Asia Pacific, involving major subsea infrastructure installation in ultra-deepwater”.

While the overall Cluster-2 development is said to be running behind schedule, owing to delays in commissioning key facilities, ONGC is tying back some of the gas fields to its existing infrastructure on the east coast.
The U-Field is now connected to ONGC's Vashishta subsea infrastructure, it added.